The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny,…

The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and the scarce empirical evidence on the matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the impacts of Brazil's Law of Quotas on the students' performance in the college entrance exam,…

As the fight over diversity-oriented postsecondary strategies like race-conscious admissions (commonly known as affirmative action) continues to play out in the courts with new legal cases, it is critical to better understand the ways policy actors in this arena are leveraging social science research and other types of sources in their organized…

The debate over race-conscious admissions has gained prominence, notably in cases such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In debates on race-conscious admissions, the question is often not whether a student will go to college, but which college the student will attend. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

This critical literature review investigates how "diversity" and "equity" are employed in top-cited higher education scholarship published between 2000 and 2015. No analysis to date has offered such a comparative exploration relative to well-recognized racial disparities in higher education. Findings reveal a divergence with…

This article examines California's Student Equity Policy crafted by policymakers to "avoid an underclass of ethnic minorities" in higher education. We combine tenets from critical race theory, interest convergence, and color-evasiveness to qualitatively interrogate 17 policy documents including chaptered bills, legislative mandates, and…

The brief first presents new facts on the extraordinary segregation of Black and Latino students in the state's public schools. Second, it shows that those groups are doubly segregated by race and poverty at the most educationally unsuccessful schools. These children are, on average, from families with far lower income and wealth and with parents…

Utilizing a critical raceclass theory of education, OiYan A. Poon and colleagues analyze interviews with Asian Americans who have publicly advocated for or against affirmative action and acknowledged how their understandings of racial capitalism informed their perspectives and actions. Limited research has considered Asian American subjectivity in…

Using a census sampling, this analysis evaluates the campus structures and practices that are predictive of a campus being affiliated with stakeholder legal advocacy regarding the Fisher Supreme Court affirmative action case of 2013. Findings reveal that a campus utilizing selective admissions operated as a sufficient, but not a necessary,…

Using a short story fiction counter-narrative, this critical race study examines how faculty of color within higher education and student affairs doctoral-granting programs bring critical epistemologies to their decision-making in the student admissions process and work to decolonize the academy despite neoliberal pressures. Faculty of color…

Eight states currently have bans on affirmative action, yet little research has focused on the characteristics of states that predict ban adoption. To begin filling this gap in the literature, I conduct discrete-time survival analysis on an aggregated data set of 47 states from 1995 to 2012 to investigate the extent to which various…

How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate…

Different from more traditional policy-making avenues, the courts provide an antipolitical arena that does not require broad agreement from various constituents for policy enactment. Seeking to guide court decisions on these policy issues, individuals and organizations have filed "amicus" briefs that increasingly include social science…

This paper investigates to what extent socioeconomic status (SES)-based affirmative action in college admissions can produce racial diversity. Using simulation models, we investigate the racial and socioeconomic distribution of students among colleges under the use of race- or SES-based affirmative action policies, or targeted, race-based…